The disclosure herein relates generally to generating message notifications.
Many users of electronic mail (email) services receive a large number of email messages on a daily basis. In many cases, users receive email messages that are not relevant to them, and/or email messages that they do not wish to receive. Because of this, many email users spend a significant amount of time managing their email accounts, including assessing messages to determine the relevancy of each message, reading relevant messages, and deleting or ignoring irrelevant and/or unwanted email messages.
It has become common for users to have near-constant access to email via portable electronic devices, such as laptop computers, tablet computers, and computationally-enabled telephones (“smart phones”). Some of these devices output notifications that describe newly-received messages, such as by displaying the name of the sender of the message along with text from the message. Users also receive messages via services other than email, such as text messages (via a protocol such as the SMS protocol), chat messages, social media messages, application-generated messages, and other types of messages. Some portable electronic devices also output notifications regarding these types of messages along with notifications regarding email messages. Compounding the challenges presented by the volume of notifications received by users, emerging technologies such as wearable computing devices including “smart watches” will allow users to be instantly notified when a new email message is received, regardless of the activity that the user is currently engaged in.